I climb painfully down into the trench, gripping the ladder—aware my back is twinging, aware I have only a couple more seasons. The new ones chatter like baby birds in a nest. Once, I too had their brash certainty. Breath rattles in the ribcage of my mortality.

The crown of a skull peeps out from the dirt, and the young ones crowd around, waiting. The skull shows signs of decorative plaster tinted with red ochre.

What thoughts and feelings animated this cranium? Why the ceremonial treatment? We will never know, and I am filled with despair.

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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here

Between the thought and the action falls the shadow. Between the wild and the built rises the fence. I have made walls, robust, secure structures, separating subject and object, good and evil. They say good fences, good neighbours make: this is mine, and that is yours. But here is a branch, heavy with fruit, that penetrates and overhangs my stern, geometrical garden. If I tend the pleading limb, keep it free of scab and canker, surely the apples are mine when they fall. How I yearn for this creeping emissary from the outside world!

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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here

Up these winding stairs, there is a man who turns water into wine; a woman who knows all one- hundred-and-sixty-thousand names of the common moths; students poring over Hittite grammars. In these dingy little rooms, live endless ghosts of scholars and sages.

We do not know each other, and yet all of us are drawn here, funnelling silently together through the narrow passageway. All of us seek answers to our different torments.

A man in a black robe stands immobile in the courtyard. He speaks. “Go. Answers are cheap—It’s good questions that are hard to find,”

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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here

I am so tired. Here, maybe there will be safe haven. Surely, when I tell my story, they’ll offer rest, give me a cup of rewarmed stew, bathe and dress my wounds. There are good people too in this world.

But the stone wall terrifies me–it has his implacable hardness. And now, that lamp I thought so welcoming, shines with the easy radiance he first used to charm me.

A shadow falls across the entrance, an arm outstretched. I turn and stumble on into the night.

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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here

Triumphantly, he straddled the boundary, one foot crunched into the snow, the other warming in hot sand.

They’d told him it was impossible: you had to wait for summer to come, they said—you couldn’t go to it. With mocking earnestness, he had explained that, of course, you could. All it took was a plane ticket. He’d known what they meant. And now he’d proved that, as Einstein taught, time is only another place.

Hopping across the frontier, he narrowly avoided being cannoned into by a boy chasing a volleyball. The lad looked familiar, just like Grandad in childhood photos.

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The grandfather paradox is a well-known refutation of the possibility of time travel. If you travel back in time and accidentally kill your grandfather, then you can never have been born to travel back in time. Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here

Once, lights in the sky would have been a delight and a wonder. She remembered the heart-stopping showers of sparkles at Eid-al-Fitr. Last night, there were lights too, and showers of sparkles, bangs and thuds. She had cowered in the doorframe with her mother and hidden her eyes from the lights tearing the darkness into shreds.

In dawn’s light, the whole building next door was gone. The bakery gone, though the bread had already run out. Sami gone, and his brothers and sisters, father, mother, aunt.

How could people be so cruel? Especially this people, who should understand suffering better than any?

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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here

Nothing

Nothing—I’m doing nothing, resting from my researches. Beyond the window, two swifts skywrite, and trees fitfully shake their green pompoms in the light breeze. Halyards strum masts in the harbour. Dappled sunshine through the leaves warm my closed eyelids and fire-up pictures. Images, red and flickering, dance in the darkness, making shapes that twist and curl. A bear cavorts with a polyhedron for a moment and then disassembles into a torrent. I see the answer to the puzzle—it’s simple and I reach out to grasp it. The solution prances away in a shower of fireflies.

I have nothing.

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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here

The plain scorching is and sweat from my brow drips. On the way from being to becoming I am. Aurochs horns we will trade and then feasting and dancing there will be, when Aşıklı Höyük we reach,. Glorious!

The horns to my back strapped carrying, difficult it is to walk. But only with obsidian laden, easier the return way will be.

If she will have me, at Aşıklı a gwain I will seek. Under the floor of the domo, my pichtehr interred is, and my gwain and I the unbroken line will continue. Oh pourer, successful let me be!

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Note

This is a test piece to see whether this is too annoying for a reader. Please let me know. The odd syntax and unfamiliar words are deliberate. It’s an attempt to follow that of the first language spoken throughout the Indo-European land mass. Verbs followed objects rather than preceding them, as they do in English. Pichtehr means father, becoming eventually pater in Latin, and gwain, from which the English word queen descends, means woman or wife. Aşıklı Höyük was a stone age settlement in what is now Turkey. It was an important centre for obsidian between 10,000 and 9,000 years ago.

Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here

“Why is his hair on top of his head like that?”

I don’t remember the child’s name. Chrissy? Carol? But, more importantly, what does she mean? Where else would my hair be?

There is a sense of wrongness, like what happens in a car crash. Time slows down. Not that I’m offended. Rather, I’m fascinated by the rudeness. I suppose this is how children are: direct.

Her father looks at me in panic. I offer no help, unsure whether the question deserves an answer or a reprimand.

Glaring at me, he answers, “That’s his brains, darling, because he’s so clever.”

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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here

They were here, and then they were gone—the couple at the next table. Sure, you tell yourself, it’s a restaurant. People sit, they eat, and go, in a constant carousel. But her laughter had been a coded message, unique to you, and the one glance across, unmistakable. That’s why they’d  removed those diners, consumed in a single bite like an amuse bouche. Next, they will come for you. How to mount a defence? The fish knife? If only you’d ordered the steak!

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Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here